O'Connor, a classroom assessment consultant in Canada, provides a set of eight practical guidelines that teachers of kindergarten through college can use to arrive at grades for their students. Each guideline chapter addresses the purpose of the guideline, its key elements, and its 'bottom line,' and concludes with reflection activities. Later chapters provide suggestions for determining grades by bringing the application of the guidelines together, and examine additional issues such as advantages and disadvantages of different grading approaches, grade point average calculation, the use of computer grading programs, student conferences, how to grade exceptional students, and legal concerns. Fifteen pages of appendices offer various grading guidelines and policies from different sources. A glossary is also included. This third edition reflects the understanding in the field that the traditional approach to performance standards--a grading scale that links letters to percentages--is incompatible with a true standards- based system, and provides a rationale for a new approach to replace it, based on level scores. There are new examples of standards-based grading at different levels of specificity. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)